Frank Reader of the Trashcan Sinatras, performing at Schuba’s in 2009. If there were any justice in the world, which there obviously isn’t, TCS would have been an enduringly high-selling, in-demand act for the past twenty years. They make some very sweet pop songs. Photo by Colin Davis.
A thoughtful little essay about Caravaggio’s “Denial of St. Peter.” What I find especially interesting about this painting is the way the left side of the painting runs temporally ahead of the right side. On the left side Peter is being accused; on the right side he is responding to the accusation. They are like two adjacent panels of a comic strip.
Rene Fijten’s illustration of China Miéville’s remarkable novel The City and The City
“Why have we not been reliably able to improve on C?” Rabkin asks. Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc.He says that academics are so often determined to build a language that stands out from the crowd, without thinking about what’s needed to actually make it useful. In some cases, he says, they fail with the simplest of things, like documentation for their language. In other cases, he says, designers will keep adding new features to a language and effectively overload the engineers who are trying to use it.
“Maybe the solution isn’t entirely technical,” Meyerov says. “We need to start building more ‘socially aware’ languages.”
Richard Wilbur, "She"
What was her beauty in our first estate
When Adam’s will was whole, and the least thing
Appeared the gift and creature of his king,
How should we guess? Resemblance had to wait
For separation, and in such a place
She so partook of water, light, and trees
As not to look like any of these.
He woke and gazed into her naked face.
But then she changed, and coming down amid
The flocks of Abel and the fields of Cain,
Clothed in their wish, her Eden graces hid,
A shape of plenty with a mop of grain,
She broke upon the world, in time took on
The look of every labor and its fruits.
Columnar in a robe of pleated lawn
She cupped her patient hand for attributes,
Was radiant captive of the farthest tower
And shed her honor on the fields of war,
Walked in her garden at the evening hour,
Her shadow like a dark ogival door,
Breasted the seas for all the westward ships
And, come to virgin country, changed again—
A moonlike being truest in eclipse
And subject goddess of the dreams of men.
Tree, temple, valley, prow, gazelle, machine,
More named and nameless than the morning star,
Lovely in every shape, in all unseen,
We dare not wish to find you as you are,
Whose apparition, biding time until
Desire decay and bring the latter age,
Shall flourish in the ruins of our will
And deck the broken stones like saxifrage.
I find it almost impossible to read Faulkner now, except for a handful of things, chief among them “The Old People” — one of the best short stories ever written. Yet reading Absalom, Absalom! as an undergraduate was one of the transcendent reading experiences of my life. I am almost certain that if I read Absalom, Absalom! for the first time now, I wouldn’t like it very much. I would think it absurdly overwrought. I might not even be able to finish it. But I don’t think that’s necessarily because I’m a smarter or better or more sophisticated reader than I was thirty years ago. Maybe I knew some things then that I don’t know any more. Maybe I was open to experiences then that — for whatever reason — I’m no longer open to.
Is this Jane Austen as a girl?
Variable-focus eyeglasses — ideal for distribution to poor people around the world.
All translation is interpretation, since it is a choice among meanings; but translation is not the same activity as interpretation. A good translation of a troubling text will preserve the reason for the trouble, and thereby leave open the gates of interpretation. The great Thomist historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson, who served on the French delegation to the San Francisco Conference in 1945, rejected a French translation of the United Nations Charter because it erased certain cunning ambiguities in the original, observing that “il faut traduire le texte dans tout son obscurité.” One must translate the text in all its obscurity: The fidelity of the translator must include a commitment to honoring the density and the alienness of the original. The translator must not preempt the mental toil of the reader.
I have to add one little comment, though. Wieseltier complains about a word being translated as “set apart” when, he thinks, it ought to be “ sanctified.” Apparently he doesn’t know that in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alike the words for “sanctification” and “holiness” just mean “set apart.” To be holy, to be sanctified, is simply to be set apart for God’s purposes. But don’t let this point distract you from this excellent insight into the nature of good translation!
As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.